We could bore the hell out of you by bragging about how good we are. But that’s what everyone does, so we’ll tell it the way it is: we’re specialized in design and development of themes, plugins and custom solutions built with WordPress that are functional and sustainable. We’re based in Genoa, Italy, and this is our website.

Right now, we’re in the process of gathering feedback and get things in order before further proceeding with its development. We know this phase is going to take a while, but rushing things out isn’t really our style.

So, we’ve received an email the other day from someone running a WordPress development company, asking us what are our plans with this framework and how are we going to maintain it, medium-long term.

While we don’t recommend running our software in production yet (again, alpha!), we’d like to share a hint about what we’d like to do with Evolve Framework.

First of all, we’re open to having external contributions, for both code and translations. If you find appealing the idea of a framework that doesn’t add clutter nor unnecessary functionality, but simply provides a powerful set of tools, then you might be interested in giving Evolve Framework a try.

We have designed the framework to be the epicenter of everything we do with WordPress, whether it’s a theme, a plugin, or a service: having a codebase that we master under the hood will allow us to build products that are faster and more secure, and in less time too.

The framework is a plugin, which means that it must be fully transparent, offering its hopefully valuable set of instruments to any other theme or plugin, whether ours or someone else’s.

Also, the framework’s developments will likely go side by side with new things introduced in WordPress core, which is one of the key concepts behind it: you have a much better chance of building something that lasts if you rely on a solid basis, and WordPress APIs are just that.

We’re not fans of blank themes in themselves, and we’re even less keen on calling them frameworks, when they’re really just starter themes. Nothing really wrong with that: it’s just not our cup of tea, and we think we can create better things following a different approach.

In the future we’d like to continue pushing out quality themes: themes that don’t break, themes that look good, and, most importantly, that are useful to our customers.

With them being powered by the Evolve Framework, we will be able to achieve a goal we have dreamed about for a long time: having a collection of products that are all on par with one another in terms of code quality and building philosophy.

We are going to create and sell plugins as well. One of them is in the works as we speak, and it’s the natural evolution of a page builder we’ve created in the past. Apart from that, which will go live hopefully soon, there’s nothing concrete yet at this moment, but a few ideas are floating around our ever-busy minds.

Over time, we’ve gained a little experience concerning WordPress development. Between successes and failures, and things that turned out pretty well while others not so much, we’ve had one and only constant: the necessity to have a shared set of tools that we could use across projects.

For a certain amount of time, we’ve followed a drop-in approach, which means importing the same folder containing the entire toolset in each and every theme we’ve been developing.

It must be said that the folder was under version control in a different repository than the rest of the project. Anyway, at some point we realized the obvious: that approach would allow us to get only that much far, and certainly didn’t offer an answer to the ever present problem of separating form, content and functionality.

So we’ve decided to create a plugin. If you go and search for “WordPress framework” on Google or Github you’ll find various examples of how the same problem can be tackled. Some even stick with the drop-in idea, probably not incurring in the issues we’ve had in the past.

Funnily enough, two things happen when browsing other people’s projects:

you admire the elegance of their code, since said code hasn’t yet had the chance to bore you,

you verify that no one does the things you want, the way you’d like them to be done.

So, since we’re wired our own way, we chose to create a development framework for WordPress products too: Evolve Framework.

The reason why the project was put on Github represents the other big change that we want to bring in our work process.

There’s no real reason to keep things for yourself, being afraid that someone else might steal your precious ideas: experience proves that we all can obtain much greater rewards when information is shared.

We started to get documentation in order as well, so make sure you have a look at it.

Right now we’d like to receive some feedback on the project, so don’t hesitate to contact us to share your opinion on it.

For now we haven’t made up our minds yet around how people are going to contribute, and even the idea of a future roadmap for the project is vague at best.

Let’s be honest, writing the very first post of a blog always feels a bit “weird”. For starters, the post appears out of the blue and on top of that it does it without the reader having any clue about the reasons that brought it to be published.

So let’s shed a light. First of all, “we” is a couple of people that started working together a few years ago, creating products based on WordPress. We focus on themes primarily, but from here on a good chunk of our developments will be devoted to plugins as well. In the future we’d like to take the next step and create a service, but that’s material for another post.

In the transition from simply being people working together to being a real company, one of the things that changes is the need to differently communicate who you are, what you do and, most importantly, why you do it.

That’s the reason why the next pages will be written: to tell something about us that we’d like our users and customers to know. But more than anything, to explain why any thing, in order not to die, must evolve.